What is commonly understood as XR and how can we aesthetically open up other, speculative understandings of XR?

Since its wide range commercialisation in the 2010s, big tech companies were eager to promote the promises of XR not only as a tool for industries, gaming and fitness but as a cultural and educational technology with a positive impact for our societies. In particular via coproduced projects, these companies laid out typical use-cases for XR: We step into other perspectives, encounter reconstructions of existing or past objects and environments and we use our bodies to freely change the viewpoint on what is presented to us. At the same time, these conceptions have been widely critiqued for ‘toxic’ claims of empathy and authenticity. They often imply that XR users are powerful, unsituated subjects, operating with ubiquitious availability in XR - the ability to be anything, or to access anything anywhere. Yet at the same time, they narrow down agency, possible relations and speculative scopes.

Taking up this criticism, this talk discusses aesthetic strategies to not only avoid, but deconstruct these claims of empathic embodiment, authentic reconstruction and autonomous reception in XR. With reference to several artistic projects, highlighting ambivalence, experimenting with responsiveness and dynamic virtual materialities, and surfacing the functionalities of XR, are all analysed as deconstructive potentials. Taking this approach, modes of aesthetic critique and different, speculative relations to the virtual become possible.

Speaker's info:

Jens Fehrenbacher is a media scholar and media artist focusing on XR, media art, memory culture and science and technology studies. One of his overarching questions is: How can aesthetic and technological practices and humanities research be productively intertwined to enable critique and imagination for alternatives? Besides his scholarly research, he has been engaged in multiple media art projects from postcolonial AR to performance installations on tracking technologies. He holds a Doctorate from the University of Hildesheim and is currently part of the interdisciplinary project “InVirtuo 4.0: Experimental Research in Virtual Environments” at the University of Bonn, where he is exploring use-cases of XR at the intersection of computer science, psychology and humanities.